andrew-zhou / tourguide

A micro-service for re-routing queries to urls and custom scripts.

tourguide

A simple web service for re-routing queries to urls and custom scripts built using Flask and Python 3.

Consider the sample list of aliases:

{
  "test": "http://www.reddit.com",
  "script": "$sample_script"
}

Making a GET request to /alias/test will redirect the client to http://www.reddit.com.

Making a GET request to alias/script will run sample_script() in scripts.py.

Making a GET request to alias/script%20foo:bar%20abc:def (note that %20 is a space) will run sample_script(foo: 'bar', abc: 'def') in scripts.py.

Basic Setup

Install Python >=3.5.2. Clone this repo and edit the aliases.json file with the desired list of aliases (see Aliases for details). For local setup, run the following in your console:

pip install -r requirements.txt
export FLASK_APP=server.py
python -m flask run

By default, tourguide will be running on port 5000 of localhost, so a GET request to localhost:5000/alias/<query> will redirect to the route defined in aliases.json for query.

Tests

The test suite is written using Python's unittest module.

To run the test suite, run the following in your console:

nosetests

Aliases

tourguide provides a single endpoint: GET /alias/<query>. The query is mapped to an alias string through aliases.json.

Alias strings can take on two forms: traditional HTTP urls and function names. To map a query to a HTTP url, simply add an item to aliases.json in the form:

"<query>": "<http_url>"

Alternatively, tourguide allows for script aliases, which are function names prefixed by a dollar sign ($). When the client makes a request with a query that routes to a script alias, the server makes a call to the corresponding function inside scripts.py. To map a query to a function, add an item to aliases.json in the form:

"<query>": "$<function_name>"

You must then define and implement a function with that name in scripts.py. These functions should always return a flask.redirect object and should take in **kwargs as its sole parameter.

Clients can pass in keyword arguments to these functions by adding key-value pairs in the form of <key>:<value> to their request. Each of these pairs should be separated from other pairs and the query by whitespace. These requests should look like:

/alias/query key1:value1 key2:value2 key3:value3 ...